Edward M. Lerner

by A New Order of Things

  “First, they’re fueled. Since we don’t have the lifeboat as an interstellar-drive prototype, a cynic”—and he winked at Art—“might say they stole that fuel. Worth, I’m guessing, a few months’ GDP for the whole solar system?

  “I’m merely your chauffeur, but you’d be surprised how high my security clearance is. Before agreeing to allow my ship anywhere near an antimatter bomb test—and let’s be honest, that’s what Art’s first little experiment was—I used that clearance. The Snakes talked a good ball game about their advanced antimatter technology. I saw no evidence they have such a thing. In fact, they were a bit slow on the uptake with our technology.

  “I don’t believe our buddies in that big old starship knew how to manufacture antimatter. They wanted our technology as much as a load of fuel. More: If all they wanted was a trip-worth’s load of fuel, they could have stayed home and saved themselves forty years. The main point of this trip must have been to Enron us out of our technology. How am I doing, Art?”

  So well it was scary. “Dead on.”

  Keizo looked ill. “But why all the killing?”

  “Because,” Art said softly, “maybe it’s not enough to steal away—if we can follow. Maybe they thought we could reverse-engineer their interstellar-drive technology from observing it in operation. Or perhaps we’re closer than we realize to having the capability on our own. Regardless, they hoped to discredit our antimatter technology so completely we’d be afraid ever to use it again. That’s why we got the disaster Keffah superciliously warned us about.” And more sadly: “And that’s why they slaughtered our experts. There’s no one left to refute their lies, no one left to rebuild our capabilities.”

  Hands shaking, Art got up to pour himself coffee from the captain’s urn. “You’re wondering how, if they lack the technology, they ever got here. That’s something I can’t answer.”

  “Actually, that’s a question that can wait.” O’Malley zoomed the holo until Victorious filled the cabin. “I’m asking myself something quite different.

  “What are we going to do about this?”

  CHAPTER 30

  Two refugee families were shoehorned into Odyssey. Together that meant four adults and five kids. There was room aboard for little more than the clothes on their backs; a cat and a parakeet, both vocal, in separate cages; a few tattered stuffed animals.

  They did not fill the void Corinne had left.

  The parents were glued to the news. In their circumstances Helmut would be too, but now he tuned it out as an unproductive distraction. Much of the shrapnel that had until recently been Himalia was moving fast. Even a small chunk at those speeds could be fatal, so he had all the ship’s sensors set at max sensitivity. His eyes were stuck to the main holo tank, in which all sensor data and calculated course projections were integrated.

  Radar showed vessels swarming around Leda and Elara; Lysithea was presently under bombardment and too dangerous to approach. The space-traffic-control display added the transponder IDs of the evacuation ships. There was a bubble in the flow, with transponder-equipped ships giving a wide berth to Victorious on its contrary path, and to the UP vessel trailing it. The starship’s fusion drive “burnt” hotter than most everything else in his false-colored IR view, hotter than the flotilla of would-be rescuers, hotter than the final returning Snake auxiliary vessels.

  Helmut did not much care for the Snakes. He had not trusted them since he and Corinne realized how that stentorian radar ping had been used to manipulate them. How like the aliens not to help after the disaster.

  He was not one easily to accept accident as an explanation, especially in matters of life and death. Corinne was dead; he wanted a reason. Conventional wisdom may have converged quickly on an industrial mishap as the cause of the Himalia disaster, but he wanted proof. How like the Snakes to belittle UP technology as the cause of the accident.

  The few facts and many speculations had yet to crystallize a vague dread Helmut could not yet articulate, leaving him to stare into the display, oblivious to his passengers. Radar echo plus transponder icon, with or without the IR flare of a fusion drive in use, equaled a ship. Radar echo without transponder icon equaled a meteor. And the lone IR source showing neither a transponder nor a radar presence?

  That combination generally meant someone up to no good.

  Art squirmed in one of two bridge chairs. Small ships triggered his claustrophobia, and Odyssey was tiny. He could not keep his eyes from straying to the ship’s single airlock, the only exit in case of a problem.

  Helmut looked offended. “It’s fine with me if we go next door.”

  “Next door” meant Actium, still shadowing the slowly receding Victorious. Why, when Mashkith insisted an exit was so urgent, that departure remained leisurely was merely the latest Snake enigma. Whatever the reason, Odyssey had easily caught up.

  After the Himalia disaster, the UP navy had tightened security. That included a background check before any civilian ships were allowed to approach. Carlos summarized the investigator’s findings as, “Your drinking buddy is underage.” The comment had been too obscure for Art. It turned out to mean there was no credible record of Helmut’s existence until five years ago. Did that make Helmut a spy, a master criminal, or someone in the witness protection program? Art’s questions got only shrugs in return.

  Whoever Helmut really was, he was a friend—one who had also lost someone in the Himalia blow-up. And ambassadors, even acting ones, have some prerogatives. “Be happy you were permitted to dock … whoever you actually are. Now what’s this about?”

  “Something important enough to drop out of the evacuation operations. Something important enough to risk personal exposure. Who I really am doesn’t matter right now.”

  “What does matter?” Art asked.

  “That I’m certain someone well-placed in the government has seen this.” At an unspoken command, Helmut’s main display holo panned back. On the periphery of the display volume, hotter than anything on the screen but Victorious, the IR view now revealed a tiny fusion flame. There was nothing there on radar. The trajectory recorded for the unknown ship climbed at an angle steeply inclined to the ecliptic.

  Its course was toward Barnard’s Star.

  A TEOTWAWKI alert got Carlos out of bed. If that hadn’t worked, Art was prepared to have the marine guards assigned to him as ambassador break down the cabin door. Art’s message contained a capture of the holo, the dot representing the stealthed ship set to blinking, and a bit of text: Confirm or refute this data.

  The response five minutes later was even terser: Bring your buddy aboard. Marines waiting on the Actium side of the docking collar escorted them to Capt. O’Malley’s cabin. One of the previously “paneled” walls now showed something like the main display on Odyssey. Art did perfunctory introductions. Carlos made no comment on the name “Helmut”; he might have been netting volumes privately to O’Malley. It didn’t matter. Art plunged ahead. “That course implies a Snake vessel. The fusion drive, hotter than humans use but like Victorious, says the same.”

  “And if it is?” O’Malley asked.

  “Remember how the Snake lifeboat went straight from deep-space demo to Himalia?” Carlos and O’Malley surely remembered everything about the apparent weapon of Himalia’s destruction. The probably Snake-caused catastrophe consumed them no less than it consumed Art, as they all awaited direction from the politicians and admirals on Earth. “I keep thinking of something Ambassador Chung said right before the lifeboat demo. Chung claimed the Foremost sent the lifeboat straight to Himalia lest I accuse the K’vithians of bait and switch.

  “What if they engaged in bait and switch?”

  O’Malley frowned in concentration. “You’re suggesting the lifeboat that we tracked all the way to Himalia, the ship our VIPs boarded, isn’t what blew up. That this stealthed ship is the one with our people?”

  “I am,” Art said.

  “On top of destroying and discrediting our antimatter program, they’d get ou
r best scientists.” O’Malley stood to stare into the holo. “If they could pull it off, it would make sense. Hell, it would be brilliant. How could it be done?”

  Helmut cleared his throat. “You track the Snake vessels, right? After the circus when they arrived, their ships began flying with UPAA space-traffic-control transponders.”

  “Right,” O’Malley agreed.

  “I don’t suppose I could have access to the Jupiter region’s UPAA data base.” Helmut shrugged at the cold look from Carlos. “In that case, I suggest someone there do a bit of data mining. The query: Find the ten closest approaches by a Snake vessel to the final course of that lost lifeboat. Timestamp them.” To inquiring looks he answered only, “Bear with me.”

  The regional data center on Ganymede took twenty minutes to respond, of which only a couple minutes could be attributed to round-trip light-speed delay. Time enough for O’Malley’s steward to arrive with fresh coffee, and to drink it. Time enough to pace and fret.

  A soft chime announced arrival of the response. O’Malley cleared a third wall of his cabin for its display. Ten swooping red paths around and grazing Jupiter: scoopship runs. One yellow path likewise shooting by Jupiter, but going no nearer than ninety-thousand klicks to the cloud tops. On its way down, the yellow track zigged and zagged on a path everyone had believed represented lessons for the passengers on the flight controls. The yellow trajectory never came terribly near a red one.

  The graphic told Art nothing. “Helmut, is this what you expected?”

  “No.” Helmut softly drummed fingers on the tabletop. “I’m missing something.”

  Was Helmut imagining things, or was Mashkith yet again a step ahead of them all? The latter would not surprise Art. He considered himself a decent amateur chess player. Maybe a month after he had made a gift of a chess set, the Foremost visited Callisto. Art had offered a friendly game; Mashkith had mated him in twenty-three moves. How many moves ahead had Mashkith plotted the visit of Victorious?

  Dammit, this was no time to lose confidence. It might not be too late to save Eva and the others! “Call the lifeboat with our people A. Helmut, you think the Snakes dropped off a stealthed lifeboat, call it B. That at some point the Snake crew took over A, stealthed it, and destealthed B. B returned to Himalia, remotely operated or on autopilot, to trigger the explosion on its final approach. The mystery ship you spotted is A, and our people remain on it.”

  Helmut nodded agreement.

  “I begin to understand your interest in scoopships,” O’Malley said. “Lifeboat B must have been sneaked into position. Once Victorious was in the neighborhood, no ship could leave it without risk of being seen. Nor could B have been prepositioned in deep space, as lifeboat A was. B approaching from deep space would have meant major deceleration, too much time at risk of being spotted on IR. But couldn’t any of these scoopships have ejected a stealthed, transponder-less lifeboat? What is this traffic-control download telling us?”

  “Fair question. Any ship meant to be kept secret must avoid chance discovery by passing human ships. Stealth and lack of a transponder would help, but as you say, there’s no disguising an in-use fusion drive.” Helmut pointed at the holo spark of the distant, stealthed ship on which Eva and Corinne and Chung might still be alive. “Drive exhaust is how we spotted this. Somehow they needed to deposit B directly in the right place to begin….”

  Helmut felt himself grinding to a halt. How many days had it been since he had slept longer than a catnap? Fear of being sold out by Rothman; a hasty flight, interrupted by the Himalia catastrophe; the evacuation run to Leda and back to Callisto; overtaking Actium.…

  Stay on task, and think sneaky. “Sorry. I’m slow today. Captain, can you add something to the display? Close approaches made by our lifeboat to any moon.” A new icon appeared in the holo. On the inbound leg of its flight, Lifeboat A passed close by the minor and very inner moon, Adrastea. It orbited deep inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a very hard radiation environment where people never went.

  Maybe, thought Helmut, I’m not hallucinating. “Okay, here’s a new UPAA query. Show ten closest approaches by Snake ships to Adrastea.”

  Coffee and doubt gnawed at his gut while this time thirty minutes passed. At a chime, the final wall lost its faux paneling. In its place, a gray blob hung in space surrounded by the red arcs of passing ships. Adrastea was twenty-six klicks along its long axis; that provided a sense of scale. The red flybys were close, some only a few hundred klicks away. “That’s it.”

  “Very clever.” O’Malley tipped his head from side to side, studying the newest holo. “One of these flybys ejects lifeboat B, some time when no human ships are around. B waits on Adrastea. Eventually, lifeboat A coasts by with its active transponder. B takes off and matches course. At the appointed time, A goes stealth and turns off its transponder. B destealths and mimics the transponder on A. There’s never more than one drive running. From a distance, no one could tell.”

  “But what if a human ship … oh, I see. That’s why A followed such a corkscrew course. Killing time because some human ship might otherwise have been too near Adrastea when it arrived. We thought it was flight training.” Art laughed softly to himself. “No wonder Mashkith trounced me in chess.”

  Helmut could feel the final pieces falling into place. “Lifeboat A is diving towards Jupiter when B takes its place. So A continues its dive, only it uses its engines to alter course a bit. Jupiter slings it out of the ecliptic. And there,” he pointed, “it is.”

  Spacers help spacers. First of all, they help shipmates. “I say we go get them.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The first hint of danger came perilously late.

  Arblen Ems Rashk Lothwer was quietly reveling in the satisfaction of his own command. His crew was handpicked. The ship was well engineered and well built, and he had proudly named it Valorous. They were necessarily flying semi-blind, making lidar sweeps ahead for space junk in their path, but emitting nothing behind that might reveal them. Nothing but their undisguisable exhaust.

  Lothwer’s only complaint, as they slipped stealthily away, was with the low acceleration on fusion drive. The herd designed for efficiency, not fast getaways. As a lifeboat, a few more days exiting a solar system by fusion drive hardly mattered since years under interstellar drive would follow. On this mission, though, the small fusion engine meant that much longer before they safely exited the zone of likely detection.

  Caution was appropriate, but it did not distract from the facts. This operation, his operation, had gone smoothly. The Foremost was stingy with his approval; the recognition due this mission—due him—would be all the more precious for that. Naught remained of this operation but a triumphant rendezvous a few days hence.

  Four brilliant heat sources suddenly flaring in his passive IR sensors shattered Lothwer’s complacency. They had to be ships in pursuit, flipped to decelerate. Their presence disclosed, one broke radio silence. “Unidentified K’vithian ship, this is the UP frigate Nelson. Destealth immediately and maintain course.”

  No harm now in a lidar scan backward. Blue-shifted echoes showed his pursuers moving at three times his speed and closing fast. To get secretly as close as possible, they would have waited to the last moment to apply the brakes. The math was simple; they would be upon him within hours.

  His sole advantage was the value of his prisoners. Had those giving chase not wanted to capture Valorous, the first hint of their approach would have been a flyby, close-range laser attack. Cursing softly as he sorted options, Lothwer added a second complaint to the short list of the ship’s deficiencies. Its only weapons were anti-space-junk lasers.

  Valorous could neither outrun nor outfight the enemy. It had to evade them. The good news was his stealth gear could fool more ships than had been sent after him.

  Lothwer cut the fusion drive, disappearing for now from the enemy’s IR sensors. Projecting his course was a simple exercise in ballistics—but Valorous remained distant enough that extrapolations
would be imprecise. The uncertainty would grow until they found him optically. It was a weak ploy, he admitted to himself: Four pursuit ships could share data and triangulate bearings. Once the first UP vessel got close, the hull of Valorous would be warm enough to betray them.

  As tactics officer, he had drilled and drilled—assuming the use of Hunter ships. His reflexes and instincts were off for this encounter. And while he did nothing, the enemy ships crept closer and closer in the tactical display

  Valorous must try to leave its projected course, and his adversaries in the other ships knew it. He could conceivably flip and change course. Whatever way he turned, some pursuers would have an oblique view of his fusion exhaust. Triangulation would make plain where and when he was coming. And almost certainly there was a second, slower tier of ships waiting just for that, still in stealth mode. Maybe a third set.

  What could he change? Valorous had chemical attitude rockets. Fired in proper sets, they would nudge its course rather than pivot it about its center of mass. Would that be detected? If only he knew the capabilities of UP military sensors. If only he had brought decoy rockets.

  Thoughts of things he did not know and did not have were unproductive. What did he have to work with? An interstellar drive that would be suicide to activate this deep in the solar system. The antimatter, explosive beyond belief, to power the presently useless drive. A simple timer or detonator to deactivate containment would make the fuel canister a powerful bomb. Too powerful, even if he could improvise a way to deliver it, because it was all in a single canister. The eruption of radiation from that large a matter/antimatter annihilation event would kill Valorous as surely as its pursuers. And yet, Lothwer thought—

  If he could not contrive an escape, extravagant destruction would be their mutual fate.